When Culture Becomes Power

Rousseau, Hegel and Adorno offer three different ways of understanding a remarkable Indian political transformation: how cultural identity can become organised power—and eventually reshape the state itself.

Political power rarely begins at the ballot box. Before a movement wins elections, it must persuade people to imagine a particular community, a shared history and a common future. It must answer a deceptively simple question: Who are we?

Modern India offers few more consequential examples of this transformation than the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, and its wider political ecosystem. Its story becomes even more revealing when placed beside two very different Indian spiritual movements: Rajneesh's search for individual liberation and Ananda Marga's attempt to combine spiritual development with social service.

All three movements spoke, in different ways, about Indian civilisation, human development and the possibility of social transformation. Yet only one succeeded in constructing a durable bridge between culture and political authority.

That difference deserves attention - not because the RSS is the only organisation to use culture politically, nor because Rajneesh or Ananda Marga lacked intellectual influence, but because the RSS demonstrates something fundamental about modern politics: a philosophy becomes politically consequential only when it is converted into institutions, identities and habits that can reproduce themselves across generations.

This is where Rousseau, Hegel and Theodor Adorno become unexpectedly useful.

Rousseau began with the problem of freedom. Human beings, he argued, enter societies that can simultaneously protect and constrain them. Political legitimacy therefore depends upon creating a collective order in which citizens remain free rather than becoming subjects of another person's will. His concept of the “general will” was an attempt to imagine a political community in which individuals participate in a common civic purpose.

But there is a dangerous ambiguity at the heart of every politics of collective identity. Who gets to define the “we”?

If the common will genuinely represents all citizens, collective identity can become a foundation of democracy. If the particular identity of one community is presented as the identity of the entire nation, the same mechanism can become exclusionary.

This distinction helps illuminate the fundamental difference between Rajneesh and the RSS.

Rajneesh's central political-philosophical instinct was toward the individual. His recurring question was essentially: Who am I beneath the layers of social conditioning? He challenged inherited religious authority, conventional morality and social conformity, and placed meditation, personal experience and inner freedom at the centre of his project.

His appeal, particularly among sections of Western youth in the 1960s and 1970s, was therefore understandable. At a time when established institutions were being challenged, Rajneesh offered a language of liberation that did not require the individual to submit to conventional religious or social authority.

Yet this strength was also a limitation.

An individual can be liberated without becoming politically organised. 

Consciousness -Spirituality- Social Work - Political Authority

Rajneesh could transform consciousness; he could challenge conventions; he could create an international spiritual culture. But none of these necessarily creates a mass political constituency.

The Rajneeshpuram experiment in Oregon demonstrated the difficulty. An attempt to build an alternative community gradually became entangled with questions of land, political influence, organisational control and criminal conduct by members of the leadership. The collapse of the experiment exposed a paradox that extends far beyond Rajneesh: a movement founded in liberation can itself generate new structures of authority.

The lesson is uncomfortable. Escaping one authority does not guarantee freedom if another authority is simply created in its place.

Ananda Marga followed a different path. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar sought to combine spiritual development with social responsibility. Meditation and yoga were placed alongside education, healthcare, relief work and a critique of economic exploitation. His PROUT framework attempted to imagine an alternative social and economic order.

Here spirituality was not simply an escape from society. It was intended to become an instrument for changing society.

Yet Ananda Marga also illustrates the difference between possessing a philosophy and possessing political power. A movement may have a coherent social doctrine, an international network and committed followers, but unless its ideas become embedded in the everyday social structures through which political identity is reproduced, its influence may remain limited.

This is precisely where Hegel provides a more powerful lens.

For Hegel, freedom was not simply an internal feeling. Human freedom became concrete through institutions—through family, civil society and the political order. The individual discovered himself not in isolation but through relationships of recognition within a social world.

Whatever one's disagreement with Hegel's conception of the state, this insight is politically important: ideas become socially powerful when they are embodied in institutions.

RSS understanding of Unusual Persistence

The RSS understood this principle with unusual persistence.

It did not begin as an electoral machine. Its emphasis was on organisation, discipline, social identity and the formation of cadres. The shakha was not merely a meeting. It was a repeated social practice. Prayer, physical training, collective activity, historical narratives and disciplined participation transformed ideology from something one merely believed into something one repeatedly experienced.

This is the crucial distinction between reading an ideology and living inside one.

A political philosophy written in a book may influence a few thousand readers.

A political philosophy translated into daily rituals, social networks, educational institutions, voluntary organisations and community activities can influence generations.

The RSS's long-term achievement was therefore not simply ideological dissemination. It was institutional reproduction.

And this is where Adorno offers another, very different warning.

Adorno's concept of the “culture industry” was developed to analyse modern mass culture and the ways in which standardised cultural forms could shape consciousness. Culture, in his account, was not politically innocent. Repetition, circulation and standardisation could create patterns of perception that appeared natural while narrowing the space for independent thought.

The RSS is not a “culture industry” in Adorno's technical sense. It is neither a commercial entertainment corporation nor a product of the mass-cultural system Adorno primarily analysed. But his framework offers a useful question: What happens when a cultural narrative is repeatedly reproduced through institutions until it becomes an everyday common sense?

This is perhaps one of the most important dimensions of the RSS's political success.

• A symbol repeated becomes familiar.
• A historical narrative repeated becomes memory.
• A memory repeatedly interpreted through the same framework becomes identity.
• Identity organised through institutions becomes political solidarity.
• And political solidarity, when connected to an electoral vehicle, can become political power.

The sequence is therefore not mysterious:

• Culture becomes identity.
• Identity becomes organisation.
• Organisation becomes social power.
• Social power becomes political mobilisation.
• Political mobilisation becomes electoral power.

This is where the RSS differs fundamentally from Rajneesh and Ananda Marga.

Rajneesh developed an international culture of individual spiritual experimentation.

Ananda Marga developed a network combining spirituality, service and social philosophy.

The RSS developed a long-term architecture for collective identity. That architecture matters more politically than a philosophy's originality. The history of the RSS therefore cannot be explained solely through the charisma of individual leaders or the popularity of particular political slogans. Its deeper strength lies in organisational continuity. Elections come and go. Governments rise and fall. Political parties split, merge and disappear. But an organisation capable of continuing its work irrespective of electoral cycles can accumulate a form of political capital that is difficult to reproduce quickly.

The relationship between the RSS and political organisations such as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and, later, the Bharatiya Janata Party was crucial in this respect. It created a division of labour between long-term social organisation and electoral politics. The cultural organisation could work on social identity and cadre formation. The political organisation could contest elections and seek governmental power. This separation created a political ecosystem rather than merely a political party.

That is why describing the BJP's rise simply as an electoral phenomenon misses a substantial part of the story. The deeper story is the prior construction of a cultural constituency. The RSS did not merely ask people to vote for a political party. It participated in constructing a political imagination within which certain political choices could appear natural, patriotic or culturally authentic.

This is also where the history becomes democratically complicated.

A nation is never culturally homogeneous. India has always been a civilisation of competing traditions—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, tribal, regional, linguistic, rationalist, atheistic and countless local cultures. No single organisation possesses an uncontested right to define “Indian civilisation”.

Nationalism Vs Equal Rights – Democracy 

The political question is therefore not whether cultural nationalism is legitimate. It is whether one cultural definition of the nation can coexist with equal citizenship for those who do not share it.

Rousseau's warning becomes relevant here. The “general will” cannot simply be the will of the majority. If the majority's particular identity becomes indistinguishable from the national identity, minorities can formally remain citizens while becoming culturally subordinate. That is the point at which nationalism becomes a test of democracy rather than merely an expression of patriotism.

Hegel adds another dimension. A political community cannot produce genuine freedom merely through collective belonging. Individuals must also possess institutional recognition, legal rights and the capacity to participate in the political order as equals.

Adorno's warning is different but equally important. When a cultural narrative is repeated with sufficient intensity and institutional reach, it can begin to appear less like an interpretation and more like reality itself.

This is the power—and danger—of cultural politics.

Yet it would be intellectually lazy to apply this critique only to the RSS. Modern liberal democracies, socialist movements, religious organisations, corporations and political parties all construct narratives, symbols and collective identities. Social media has dramatically intensified the process.

The question is therefore not whether political movements use culture. They all do. The question is who can institutionalise culture most effectively, reproduce it most consistently and connect it to political organisation over the longest period of time. On that measure, the RSS has been unusually successful.

Its achievement is even more striking because its political influence did not emerge primarily from a single spectacular moment. It accumulated gradually through organisational discipline, social networks, cultural narratives, affiliated institutions and political alliances.

That makes its success fundamentally different from the spectacular but short-lived political experiment of Rajneeshpuram.

It is also different from Ananda Marga's more service-oriented model.

Rajneesh tried to transform the individual.

Ananda Marga tried to transform the relationship between spirituality and society.

The RSS sought to transform the cultural understanding of society itself.

That distinction explains much of the difference in political outcomes.

But there is a deeper paradox here.

The RSS's success demonstrates the power of culture to create political authority. Yet once political authority is acquired, the direction of influence reverses. Politics begins to reshape culture. The process becomes:

Culture → Identity → Organisation → Political Power → State Institutions → Cultural Transformation.

At that stage, the question is no longer simply how a movement gained power. The question becomes what happens when a cultural movement acquires sufficient political influence to participate in defining the culture of the nation itself. That is where the democratic stakes become much larger.

A cultural movement can strengthen democracy when it encourages participation, solidarity and civic responsibility. It can weaken democracy when cultural belonging becomes a condition for full national legitimacy.

• National identity can unite citizens. It can also create insiders and outsiders.
• Spirituality can liberate individuals. It can also become an instrument of authority.
• Tradition can provide continuity. It can also be used to freeze social hierarchies.
• Collective memory can heal historical wounds. It can also perpetuate historical antagonisms.

The challenge for India is therefore not to choose between culture and democracy. The challenge is to ensure that culture remains plural while democracy remains universal.

This is where Rousseau, Hegel and Adorno converge - not in their political conclusions, which are profoundly different, but in the questions they force us to ask.

Rousseau asks whether the collective genuinely protects freedom.

Hegel asks whether freedom has been embodied in institutions of mutual recognition.

Adorno asks whether the cultural environment itself is shaping consciousness in ways individuals no longer recognise.

Together, they provide a powerful framework for examining the Indian experience.

The RSS did not achieve political power simply because its ideas were more persuasive than those of Rajneesh or Ananda Marga. It succeeded because it built something the others did not build at comparable scale: a durable institutional bridge between cultural identity and political organisation.

That is the real historical significance of its rise.

Cultural Nationalism – Political Power

The lesson is not that spirituality inevitably leads to politics, nor that cultural nationalism inevitably produces political domination. The lesson is more subtle.

Ideas acquire political power when they become institutions. Institutions acquire durability when they become habits. Habits acquire political force when they become identities. And identities become instruments of power when they are connected to the state.

The history of the RSS is therefore ultimately a history of that transformation.

It is the movement from belief to identity, identity to organisation, organisation to power, and power back to culture.

And that is why the most important question for Indian democracy today is not simply whether the RSS has become politically powerful. It is whether India's extraordinary civilisational diversity can remain larger than any single definition of Indian identity.

A democracy does not become weaker because citizens possess strong cultural identities. It becomes weaker when one identity claims the right to speak for the entire nation. The enduring democratic challenge, therefore, is not to eliminate cultural nationalism, spirituality or collective memory. It is to ensure that none of them becomes so powerful that the citizen must surrender individual freedom in order to belong.

The ultimate test of any cultural movement is consequently not how effectively it creates followers.

It is whether it can tolerate citizens who refuse to become followers. That is where the question of culture finally becomes a question of freedom.